An LCD realizes image display by controlling light irradiated from a backlight by various methods. For example, a liquid crystal panel controlling transmission state of light, a polarizing plate transmitting a polarized light selectively, an optical compensation film for enhancing reproducibility of color display and viewing angle properties, and the like are used. Of these, the optical compensation film controls retardation of reflective index possessed by a film by stretching a polymer film or coating an organic material to enable optical compensation according to various requests. For example, in LCD having a liquid crystal panel in which the liquid crystal-acting mode is a TN mode or an STN mode, various viewing angle widening techniques are used for compensating narrowness characteristic to the modes. For example, there are known a method using an alignment dividing means, a half-tone means or the like for averaging pixels while separating the pixels into a plurality of regions having different directions of liquid crystal molecular alignment, a method using a convergent lens or a divergent lens, a method using a viewing angle compensating film, and a method of radically improving the liquid crystal operating mode such as IPS, MVA or OCB. Among these methods, the method of improving the liquid crystal operating mode and the method using a viewing angle compensating film are simpler and have been aggressively put into practice.
Especially, the method using a viewing angle compensating film is simpler than the method of changing and improving the liquid crystal operating mode, because an optical compensating film integrated with a polarizing plate can be stuck to a liquid crystal panel without any change of the liquid crystal panel. That is, this method is a technique by which widening of the viewing angle can be achieved at low cost. A film having oblique discotic liquid crystal inclined or a film having oblique rod-like nematic liquid crystal is known as the viewing angle compensating film. In either case, a liquid crystal polymer is obliquely oriented (e.g. see Patent Document 1). There are also known an obliquely oriented film using a side chain-type liquid crystal polymer (e.g. see Patent Document 2) and a method using an optically oriented film as a nematic polymerizable liquid crystal compound exhibiting homeotropic (perpendicular) orientation to form an obliquely oriented liquid crystal layer (e.g. see Patent Document 3).
However, in the conventional methods, obliquely oriented liquid crystal layers having a relatively small degree of obliquity are only obtained and it is difficult to obtain an obliquely oriented film having a large degree of obliquity. In addition, there is commonly known a method of increasing a degree of obliquity by increasing the thickness of the obliquely oriented liquid crystal layer but the orientation state becomes unstable with the increase of the thickness and thus it is difficult to control the thickness. Thus, unless an obliquely oriented liquid crystal layer having a large degree of obliquity can be stably obtained, a retardation range capable of optical compensation of LCD and the like is limited. Therefore, it has been desired to stably obtain an obliquely oriented film comprising an obliquely oriented liquid crystal layer having a large degree of obliquity.
Patent Document 1: JP 8-5838 A
Patent Document 2: JP 2000-327720 A
Patent Document 3: JP 2002-214610 A